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Friday, February 14, 2014

Just checked my writing blog and realized it was
painfully in need of updating. Last
entry: back in March! Sorry, I’ve been
quite remiss in keeping it up.

I have been writing.
Mostly work on a novel, hence the dearth of short stories this year,
though I did manage a few pieces of flash, most of which are up over at Every
Day Fiction.

Update for 2013.
My word totals were a little under my goals (which is 1K words a
day). I ended up with 259,000 words for
twenty thirteen. Not bad, but I should
be able to manage more. But, with the
novel writing, I’m doing a lot of revising, so that kept the word totals
down.

The biggest thing on the writing front for
Two-Ought-Thirteen was I got the chance to attend the Summer Writing Program at
Yale last June. Not only was it quite a
cool experience to spend a week attending Yale, but the program was taught by
my favorite writer, John Crowley.
Getting to meet John and work with him one-on-one on my writing was
quite a thrill for me. I can’t tell you
how much I am in awe of this man and his writing ability. I hope just a little bit rubbed off.

The little town of New Haven, CT was the locale of the
program, and it was a cool little town.
The Yale campus was interesting, as it isn’t cordoned off by itself like
a lot of universities, but it sort of just permeates the town, with lecture
halls and student residences mixed in on the streets with restaurants and other
businesses.

My favorite of these other places was a little cigar bar
called the Owl Shop. It’s an old guard
cigar store that’s been around since the ‘30s, and it’s the only place where
you can get a drink AND a smoke in town.
Smoking, outlawed everywhere else, is allowed in the Owl Shop as their
license is grandfathered, or whatever you call it. Anyway, it was pleasant after class and
meetings each day to stop by and have a beer and a nice cigar in a cool old
environment.

So, to sum up, Yale was cool. I met some cool new writing friends, got to
know John Crowley, and enjoyed staying in the rather castle-y student dorms and
eating in the Hogwarts-y Yale dining hall.

The novel I’ve been working on is a new one, different
from the ones I’ve got in my ‘in the works’ section here on the blog. I still work on those from time to time, but
this new one is an expansion of the short story I wrote for the Yale Workshop,
called ‘The Fairies of Maine.’ (Since I
was working with John Crowley, I couldn’t resist writing a fairy story of my
own)

TFOM takes place during a single week in June in the
fictional town of Brandywine, Maine.
(The week of Midsummer’s Eve, no less)
It follows the varied and diverse lives of five people who stay at the Brandywine
Inn for that week, and their subtle interactions with the world of Faerie.

So, that’s about all for now. Hopefully, I’ll have some interesting little
tidbits to keep the blog fresh this year.
For now, back to the writing grindstone.